On Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:29:05 -0800, Rich Grise wrote:
Ignoramus22805 wrote:
If he processes a lot of data in all kinds of ways, I would use perl.

Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister?

Sure, but also Practical Extraction and Report Language. Both
names appear, one line apart, on page xii in the Camel Book
(Programming Perl; Larry Wall and Randall Schwartz; O'Reilly).
The Perl slogan is, 'There's more than one way to do it!'.

Perl is a good choice in many ways, far better than almost
any Redmond product, but for a non-programmer trying to get
things done, Python probably is a better choice. The language
is far better organized than most. Online documentation and
support is good. Eg, http://docs.python.org/library/ and
sibling pages are nicely done.

Mathematica (mentioned before) would be an ok idea for Ed's son
if he needs to use higher math functions. Schools often have
Maple or Mathematica and Matlab available since academic versions
cut the prices so much, but some of the freely-distributed
programs pari/gp, maxima, Scilab (mentioned before) and Octave
are of comparable power to some of those high-priced products.
Python of course has bignum and/or pygmp support.

Python has packages one can use in a program via 'import'
statement; see http://pypi.python.org/pypi. But the
only really obvious economics related stuff seems to be
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/econ/0.4.

--
jiw